As photographers like Edward Weston turned photography away from soft-focus treatments of “literary” themes toward sharply-focused studies of natural objects in real environments, the accepted description of a good photo changed. Ansel Adams’ multi-volume Zone System series taught black-and-white photographers how to see in shades of gray, how to pre-visualize, measure, expose, develop, print and present images that take full advantage of the special power of monochrome materials. Adams, Weston, and other notables, including Paul Caponigro, Wynn Bullock, and John Sexton, are known for their voluptuous black- and-whites of the natural landscape, making rocks and sand appropriate subjects for fine art. Photo-artist Eric T. Kunsman, working in the masters’ tradition, makes similarly dramatic, long-scale photographs of payphones, clearly demonstrating that snippets of urban landscape can be moving and meaningful fine art as well. Kunsman's "street" photos of Rochester, New York, are not candids shot from the hip; they are planned and produced with the same focus and form, care and craft as Weston's Big Sur and Adams' Yosemite. Although these photos are gorgeously-realized, technically-perfect visual art, they form an equally-careful sociological study of a city, privilege and prejudice, and life in its “bad” neighborhoods. Warned that his new neighborhood was dangerous and crime-infested because it had “payphones everywhere”, Eric researched to find facts and, in the process, documented a bleak urban landscape and a very surprising gesture by Frontier Communications to spare profits to serve people in need.
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